In an image display system that displays images that have been produced by another processing device in real time over a transmission path, various factors such as restrictions on transfer bandwidth dictate that images are compressed for transfer then the image data is expanded for display by a processing device at the transfer destination.
However, such compression is not particularly effective with some images. One example of such an image is a special image in which adjacent pixels have greatly different properties, such as a demo image in which a game character and a large amount of lettering are mixed together to form a game image. When a special image of this type is transferred, the corresponding image data takes up the entire transfer bandwidth and has a low transfer efficiency.
The present invention was devised in the light of this technical problem and has as an objective thereof the provision of a game system, a game data distribution machine, game machine, an image display system, and computer-usable information that make it possible to increase the efficiency of the compression and transfer of images that are otherwise difficult to compress efficiently.